


delicate in every way but one (the swordplay)

by woodlands



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Alternate Universe - Monster Hunters, Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, happy halloween month y'all!, i don't want to say supernatural au but... supernatural au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-09
Updated: 2020-10-09
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:07:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26901145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/woodlands/pseuds/woodlands
Summary: Flint and Silver hunt the things that go bump in the night.
Relationships: Captain Flint | James McGraw/John Silver
Comments: 12
Kudos: 51





	delicate in every way but one (the swordplay)

**Author's Note:**

> i am a big ‘ole fraidy cat so the violence and horror inherent in the 'monster hunters' trope in this isn't too graphic--definitely less graphic than the kind of violence shown in the show. i've put a quick synopsis in the end notes just in case!
> 
> \- title from lorde's 'glory and gore' because it's an excellent song for battle boyfriends

Flint’s blade slides sharp and clean in the shadows.

The horror whines, shrill, furious, lashing out with its talons. He swallows the sting of pain when the claws rip into his shoulder, and uses it to fuel his next onslaught, slamming forward hard with the butt of the broadsword and then whirling, blade first, to slice off what would approximate the head. It collapses with a sickening thud.

Silver, perched atop the blasted-out shell of a Honda Accord, whistles. “Just under thirty seconds. _Almost_ , but not quite.”

“You got lucky,” he points out, for what feels like the hundredth time, wiping the blade clean and stepping over the trail of guts he’s made. It’s been over a year and Silver is still gloating about the horror he’d eviscerated in Mexico City. Flint maintains that skewering it with a piece of rebar only counts if you knew the rebar was there in the first place; Silver had been trying to bury his knife blade in the creature’s side when they’d both toppled into the wreck of a gas station and he’d narrowly missed getting a matching hole through his own chest. But it had only taken fifteen seconds from start to finish, so Silver holds the record on a technicality. 

Silver’s pale eyes glint in the deepening dusk, narrowing in on Flint’s torn-up shoulder. “Gonna do something about that?” He doesn’t wait for a response, just jumps down and herds Flint backwards into the pool of dim moonlight reflecting off the car’s hood. Flint lets him do it. He’s long since stopped beating himself up for what he accepts from Silver.

“It’s pretty shallow,” Silver murmurs, fingers prodding directly into the gashes, making him wince, “We still have some antiseptic, I think. Won’t do much good if it was venomous. You didn’t happen to notice, by any chance?”

He shrugs.

The corners of Silver’s mouth pinch downwards under his unkempt mustache. He disappears into the darkness. When he emerges, he’s got one of the horror’s severed digits in his right hand and Flint’s pistol in his left. 

“Don’t remember dropping that,” Flint says. He takes it from Silver and checks it over before holstering it. “Thanks.”

Silver hums absently in response, hunched over the talon in his hand. “I think we’re alright,” he decides eventually. He tosses it aside and wipes his hands on his jeans. “Let’s head back to the house. I can’t clean that too well without some real light.”

Flint doesn’t point out that he has need of help dressing the wound. Silver hasn’t noticed yet that he doesn’t actually need him for much of anything and he’s not about to start calling attention to that fact. 

He follows Silver back towards the road, which winds up through the foothills and will lead them to the small farmhouse they’ve been squatting in for the last few days. They walk in silence. He can feel the horror’s blood drying on his skin, making him itch. He scratches idly at the back of his hand as they go. 

They’ll be moving on soon, now that they’ve killed it, and he’s already dreading their departure. There’s no electricity in the house, but the pipes have running water. They’ve been taking turns using the honest-to-god shower. The cold spitting spray of water is so luxurious he could cry. 

Headlights flicker into existence behind them, and they’re off the road and crouching in the grass between one breath and the next. “We don’t need a new one,” Silver reminds him under his breath, “Flint. Ours is in perfectly fine shape.”

“Yes, okay,” he says, because Silver is right; their car is battered but the engine is new from the last time they were in DC and the ancient disc drive still works. The only CD they have is _Rumours_ , stolen from a gas station, but he doesn’t mind listening to it on repeat; Silver sings along sometimes and anyway Flint doesn’t mind Fleetwood Mac.

The truck rolls by them slowly, tires crunching over the gravel. Both tail lights are out. They wait until it disappears into the next bend in the road before rising out of the grass. Silver looks spectral in the moonlight: long hair hanging loose over his shoulders, face swamped by his overgrown beard and mustache, eyes sunken. He’s struck with the memory of Silver as he was when they’d first met, how quick he’d been to smile, how those smiles never reached his eyes. Now, operating mostly at night, he’s learned to read Silver’s expressions from the way the shadows of his eyes shift in the dark. His smiles are rarer and sharper, now. They look good on him, when they appear. 

It’s another twenty minutes of walking before they reach the house. It sits back from the road at the end of a winding, pitted tar driveway, barely visible from the road during daylight hours. The trees overhead block out enough of the moonlight to make the going difficult as they make their way up the drive, and Silver stumbles over the roots of a tree; Flint fights his instinct to reach out a steadying hand. 

The house is four levels: a basement, ground floor, upstairs, and an attic that appears to have been locked up for years. Dark and silent inside just as it is outside, the farmhouse is not particularly welcoming. He checks the basement while Silver does a sweep of the ground floor, prosthetic thumping on the floor above Flint’s head as he does. “All clear down there,” Flint says, coming up the stairs and back into the kitchen. 

Silver nods. There’s a stripe of moonlight over his face and hair from the window, illuminating one eye and turning the iris nearly white. “Nothing up here, either. Look what I found.”

It’s a book. Defoe. Flint takes it from Silver when he holds it out, cradles it gently in the palm of one hand and lets it fall open, the pages making a soft dry sound. There’s just enough light from the window to make out the words. “ _It was not like appearing in the Head of an Army, or charging a Body of Horse in the Field; but it was charging Death itself on his pale Horse_ …”

He looks up. Silver has been watching him, but his eyes flick to Flint’s shoulder in response. “Anyway, c’mon,” he says, softly, “I need some sleep.”

Flint goes first, pistol cocked. The stairs creak, and one of the treads is missing; he steps carefully over it and doesn’t take his eyes away from the dark maw of the upstairs hallway. There had been no signs of an infestation in or around the house when they’d arrived, and the running water indicated that whoever had lived here before had vacated recently. Still. They’d learned the hard way not to trust anything aside from each other.

But the house, it appears, is empty. Silver sinks onto the bed in the room they’re sharing with a groan while Flint does a quick check of the other, empty bedroom. “Fuck,” he calls, “I think I’m going to need a new one soon.” When he works the prosthetic off, the sock underneath is soaked with sweat. 

“We can head back to San Diego next,” Flint suggests as he comes into the room, dropping his pistol on the bedside table and sitting down next to him. “Howell--”

“Yeah,” Silver mutters. He’s peeled the sock off and tossed it to the floor, and in the pale light he looks wan and tired. “Go shower. I’ll bandage your shoulder after I’m done with this.” 

“Alright.” He stands. Silver’s kit is under the bed, so he crouches for it and pulls it out. “Don’t cut corners this time.”

“Sure thing, capitan,” Silver says, sarcastically. 

Flint’s mouth twitches up involuntarily in a hint of a smile before he heads to the bathroom to wash. He brings the pistol with him, just in case, and swipes the sock off the floor to rinse in the sink with his own clothes. 

The cold water is a shock to step into but quickly turns to relief in the hot summer air, and he allows himself the indulgence of a few moments of just standing under it, letting it run over his face and neck, sluice through his hair. Silver had found a dusty bar of soap under the sink that they’ve almost used up, so Flint is economical with it, washing his body quickly and rinsing his hair as best he can with water only. The soap is old and smells like stale roses. 

When he gets out, Silver is putting away the kit, the prosthetic cleaned and oiled, the hydraulics tuned. He thumps into the bathroom on the crutch and takes his own shower, swearing loudly when the cold water starts.

Flint’s shoulder makes itself known when he starts getting dressed again, so he pulls on his trousers and sits down on the bed without the shirt. He’s rifling through one of the packs, looking for the antiseptic, when Silver comes back in, dripping. 

“No, it’s here,” Silver says, sitting on the chair across from the bed and bending down to pull the bottle out of the other pack. He’d gotten dressed in the bathroom but hadn’t bothered to button his shirt all the way, and it gapes open when he does so. “The gauze, too, I think.”

Once the supplies have been gathered, Silver pivots off the chair and settles next to him on the bed. His hands are gentle on Flint’s skin as he cleans the wound. “One of these days one of us’ll get swiped by something a little more venomous than this,” he says while he works, voice pitched low in Flint’s ear. “And then where will we be?”

He tries not to shiver. “Probably down to a one-man show.”

A soft huff of a laugh that brushes over his skin. “A less effective show, at that.” 

The mattress is in bad shape, and their combined weight forces it to sag; without meaning to he finds that his thigh is pressed up against Silver’s. He watches the shadow of the tree outside the window flicker through the moonlight as it hits the wall opposite. “I don’t know,” he says, hyper-aware of Silver’s fingers moving over his skin, “Fewer stops on the road to piss might speed things up a little.”

There’s a irregular banging sound in the attic above them and they both pause, listening. A shutter has come loose in the wind, probably. They listen to it for a moment.

“Anyway,” Silver says, bringing the roll of medical tape up to his mouth to rip a piece. Flint doesn’t watch him do it. “Listen, If I didn’t make you pull over every now and then you’d drive until you couldn’t see straight.”

That’s true. There’s not a lot of joy in this life they lead, but a long stretch of road, the rise and fall of it like slow-rolling waves… He closes his eyes against the sting of pain when Silver smooths the last piece of tape over the gauze and then slaps the bandage, grinning. He is mercurial with Flint’s injuries and his own, at times stunningly careful, others nearly vicious. When he first lost the leg, he’d been so careless with it that Flint had to take him back to Howell, febrile with infection. The doctor had threatened to take off more of the leg. Silver got less careless.

“Ow,” Flint says, deadpan. He turns his head a few degrees so he can watch as Silver rubs his thumb over the tape in apology, then drags it up over his shoulder to the base of his neck. 

Silver is watching his own hand move. He’s thinking. His palm flattens hot and heavy over Flint’s shoulder blades. “It’s a thing of sublimity, you know, watching you fight.”

He doesn’t know what to say to that. 

Silver’s eyes glint out from the hollows of his face. “Most people become… less of themselves. A desperation takes over, or an anger, or both. The individual is blurred out and replaced with the collective of every human who has ever tried to slay a beast. But you--” His tongue darts out to wet his lips. “You become _more_ of yourself, you...”

“You’re not usually one for flattery.”

Silver laughs. “It’s not a compliment.”

“No, I suppose not.”

“Did you know, back when we were crewed up with Billy—I told him I thought you had something of the supernatural in you?”

The house creaks around them. “That so?”

“You seemed to always be able to anticipate its next move, when the thing probably didn’t know what it would do next itself. And you know there’s no one better than you for finding them in the first place.”

It’s warm, in this little bubble between them. Flint is so used to the cold. 

Silver’s hand on his shoulder feels heavier than any burden he’s ever tried to carry. Flint says, “And what did Billy have to say about that?”

A snort. “Billy looked at me like I was crazy, but I’m not convinced he didn’t spend the rest of that hunt thinking about it.”

He puts his hand on Silver‘s knee. It’s unclear to him why he’s never done this before. 

“And what conclusions have you come to since?”

“Oh,” Silver says, hand sliding up to wrap around the back of Flint’s neck, voice low and liquid, “I don’t think there’s anything supernatural about you at all. I think you’re very, very human.”

It’s silent in the house. Flint tilts toward Silver, but stops before he gets too close. Silver’s gaze has shifted away from him to someplace vague over his shoulder. 

His hand stops its slow march over Flint’s skin. “We didn’t check the attic,” he says, distantly.

Making sense of that feels like trying to swim to the surface of the ocean, Silver’s hand a leaden weight keeping him down. “What?”

Silver’s eyes go wide and sharp. “When did that noise stop? And why the fuck didn’t we check the lock on the....”

A beat. Then—

Three things happen all at once: Silver dives for the pistol on the bedside table; Flint lurches to his feet; and something hissing and formless launches at them through the doorway.

\--

The horror rams into Silver, halting his path to the pistol. “Fuck,” he yelps, scrabbling for it, throwing an elbow out, trying to get it off of him, having no luck. Unthinking, Flint throws himself at it, sinking his fists into its grimy sides, whaling on it as best he can without catching his skin on its sharp spine. “Get—the fucking—“

“I’m _working_ on it,” Silver grunts, annoyed. 

With the monster between them, Flint hears more than sees when Silver finally gets his hand on the pistol. The shot is muffled. He’s fired it at point blank range. That won’t be enough to kill it but it might slow it down enough for one of them to get a hand on a blade. 

Wounded, the thing careens away from Silver, directly into Flint, sending them both tumbling back into the hallway. With less room to maneuver, the horror twists and screams, trying to get its bearings, trying to get at Flint. 

He rolls away from it and scrambles to his feet, breathing hard, and scrabbles for the stairs, hoping the loose banister will yield a broken upright he can use as a weapon. But the horror comes down the hall after him, hulking and nightmarish, and as he backs up, the attic door swings on its rusted hinges, bumping into him gently from behind. 

There’s another one descending from above. 

He can see it from the corner of his eye, emerging from the shadows of the attic. “Fuck,” he says again under his breath, just as Silver’s head appears just over the back of the first creature.

“Catch,” Silver says, tossing Flint’s blade towards him, stabbing at the horror with his knife once his hand is free. 

Flint ducks under the blade as it swings through the air, sliding a hand into its trajectory to grab hold of the handle without cutting himself. “There’s a second one,” he shouts at Silver, slamming the attic door shut and backing against it, just in time, because the second horror slams against it bodily, making the whole thing shake. 

Silver rarely fights without the prosthetic, but he’s not letting this slow him down—the crutch becomes an extension of his arm, half support and half weapon when the balance is right. With the blade in his right hand and the crutch in his left, he manages to slice into the beast once, twice, before they're tumbling down the stairs together. But Flint doesn’t have time to worry about Silver, who can handle himself. The horror still in the attic is nearly breaking through the old wood of the door. 

He levels the blade in his hand and steps back, releasing his hold on the door. It slams open, and the horror comes barreling out at him with a scream. 

Lunging to avoid its dripping talons, he tries to slice up into it but gets knocked off-kilter instead; one of its arms knocks heavily into him, slamming him back against the wall. With his sword arm pinned, he shoves his fingers towards the space where its eyes might be, if it had any. It wails. Slams bodily into him, hard enough to make him drop the sword. It skitters across the floor and clatters down the stairs as he grabbles with the monster.

He's angered it, but he's also achieved what he was looking for: he's found its mouth. With his free hand, he wrenches hard at the facsimile of a head, enough to free his other arm, shake himself of it entirely. The thrill of the fight has taken hold, and he can't hear much over the rush of blood in his ears, the mangled yell he lets out as he throws himself at it, heedless of its talons and deadly, oozing spine. Its mouth opens wide next to his head and he grabs for it, pulling it in close and twisting hard. A loud, sickening crack, and the thing collapses, deflating the same way they always do when he's killed one.

It’s quiet down below. He can’t see anything at the bottom of the stairs, so he goes slowly, feet careful and sure on the treads. There’s no sign of the horror or of Silver when he gets to the bottom, just a slimy streak of gore on the floor that he’s careful to step over. 

He follows it quietly, making only the barest of sounds with each foot fall. Otherwise the house is silent again—even the wind outside has died down. 

One hand on the wall as he walks, he enters the kitchen, which is splattered with dark stains that weren’t there when they’d come into the house. Hopefully, that isn’t any of Silver’s blood smeared over the door to the basement. The trail leads him into the front room, then out the front door and onto the rotten porch. He pauses. 

A dark shape slides around the side of the house and collides with him, sending him backwards until they both hit the door frame.

It’s Silver. It’s gotta be, because every horror he’s ever encountered has had a gaping maw for a mouth, brimful with teeth made for grinding through flesh and bone—whereas the mouth on the shadow pressing against him is slick, and warm, and insistent against his own, with a tongue that presses soft and sweet to his upper lip.

“Fuck, what?” gasps Flint when he pulls back, but he grips Silver hard around the waist and yanks him close anyway.

“Yeah,” Silver says, “That’s the idea.” He finds Flint’s mouth again and leans almost completely into him, free hand coming up to touch Flint’s jaw, strangely soft given how grimy the two of them are. 

He lets Silver bite down on his lower lip for an agonizing, thrilling moment before he tilts his head back. “Is it dead?”

A hum of affirmation. Silver’s hand on the back of his neck, a familiar touch, still something to be marveled at. “Yours?”

“Yeah.”

Silver’s tongue in his mouth sparks through his body, hotter than hellfire. He sucks on it enthusiastically, pulling a groan from Silver that he can feel echo in his own throat. It's easy, then, to get lost in it for a little while, to kiss Silver and slip his fingers under the hem of his shirt to rest them against the warm skin at the small of his back.

But easy isn't ever the right choice, the way they live their lives. “We should do another sweep," he murmurs, "check the attic for others. Might be a nest.” He says all this into the juncture of Silver’s neck and shoulder. 

"In a minute, I'm busy," Silver whispers. The wind is picking up again. Silver’s hair sweeps over them both, getting in the way, and Flint runs his hands up over Silver’s ears to brush some of it back, kiss him again. 

“When was the last time you—“

“Shut up, please,” Flint says, as pleasantly as possible, and yanks hard on Silver’s hair. The movement forces Silver back a step, weight balanced more equally on the crutch, and bares his throat to Flint.

He licks a stripe from Silver’s collarbone to the edge of his jaw, then extricates himself from the warm pull of Silver’s touch. “I’ll check the attic.”

“Oh, fuck you,” Silver groans from behind him, but Flint can hear, after a moment, the sound of his uneven gait on the floorboards, the creak of the front door as he shuts and bolts it. 

They’ll both need another shower, he thinks, stepping carefully over the missing tread on the stairs. Maybe they ought to take one together. 

It’s a cheery thought. He doesn’t get a lot of those, these days. Another follows just behind it: that any moment now Silver will discover Flint's broadsword on the stairs, clean as it was an hour ago, when he'd wiped it down carefully and laid it by the bed. It had taken him more than Silver's record time of 27 seconds to kill the horror, but perhaps, if he's persuasive enough, he can make a case for having killed it with his bare hands.

But first things first: find his pistol and sweep the attic. He can hear Silver coming up from the basement. They'll clear the house, get themselves clean, lock the door to the little bedroom. They've had enough of monsters for one night. 

**Author's Note:**

> flint and silver hunt unnamed/unspecific "horrors" for a living? for fun?, so there are a few short descriptions of them in battle. flint gets a scrape. neither flint nor silver is particularly afraid of the monsters, but they are caught unaware by two of them that results in a somewhat desperate scrabble to defend themselves. flint kills one with his bare hands. there is a nonspecific mention of blood/gore that turns out to be one of the horrors'.
> 
> anyway come hang out on [tumblr dot com](https://halewoods.tumblr.com)!
> 
> comments are much appreciated!


End file.
